So since lilbuddha and twilight are the two people on the ship who have threads yelling at them for racism here, clearly we think they are the two most racist people on the ship? Because the angle of thread strikes me as very strange.
So since lilbuddha and twilight are the two people on the ship who have threads yelling at them for racism here, clearly we think they are the two most racist people on the ship?
Telford I will have to take yoru word for. He does not have enough redeeming in him that I am tempted to look at that thread. I still don' think there's a remote chance lilbuddha belongs in that crowd, particularly racism wise. Though now I'm wondering who would survive if you shut them in an elevator together.
Louise, we cannot know how many of the 9 white deaths among the 19 listed¹ between 2015 and 2020 killings by law enforcement officers in the UK by Wikipedia (link) are of the GRT (Gypsy Roma Traveller) community as those statistics are not kept. It's the first recommendation of the Women and Equalities Committee report entitled Tackling inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities²
1. Data collection The Race Disparity Audit should review all the government and public datasets that currently do not use the 2011 census ethnicity classifications and require their use before the end of 2019. Also that Romani Gypsy, Irish Traveller and Roma categories should be added to the NHS data dictionary as a matter of urgency.
Ethnicity classifications are not consistently included in police and Crown Prosecution Service statistics
The 2011 census was the first to collect information about the GRT community, and it was recommended a tick box be included in the 2021 census
We just do not know how likely it is for GRT community members to die at police hands because that information has not been collected.
lilbuddha is not being yelled at for being racist, but for asserting that her gate keeping, information and world view is the one and only correct one.
I'm certainly not 'yelling racist'. I think lilbuddha continues to be very rude towards EM. It seems to me that EM may be finding things tricky here at present, so maybe we could be kind.
I am puzzled that there seems to be some aspects of identity that are beyond query and question - gender and sexuality. Whilst its open season on others - ethnicity and ethnic identity.
Asher
(There are no stats kept by the home office of GRT levels in prison, but the Guardian reports that 5% of the prison population are GRT with a census data shows that 0.1% of the UK population are GRT.
The Traveller Times reports that local authorities have a 'hidden' policy of building traveller sites next to refuse tips and sewage treatment works. I can think of 2 locations in the East of England where traveller sites are wedged between the two.)
We have White Gypsy/Traveller as a category when we collect ethnicity information about our NHS population screening subjects.
According to the information I've seen, since 2011. I know I monitored the traveller kids I worked with in an alternative education setting since 2013 and it was coded into the systems. It was something we monitored closely, as this setting worked with a significant proportion of travellers, far more than 0.1% of our student base, more like 5%. But the kids I worked with in mainstream in the early 2000s weren't coded for traveller status, and some at least were GRT*.
However, the police and court system have not been using those codes according to the recent, 2019, parliamentary publications considering GRT discrimination.
* I dealt with one at least of our kids having a rough time for being a traveller, taking a lot of abuse for it - I suspect with hindsight, they were also dealing with being burnt out of a previous van. I was aware of at least one other, but as part of the special needs administration I wasn't monitoring traveller learning, lots of other needs, but not travellers. That school is in a town with a traveller camp on the hidden in behind the edges of the town.
To me it looks more like a civil war between two people who are both passionate for justice for communities they associate with, not helped by the presence of outside agitators. With a large part of the dispute being the extent to which one needs first hand experience of that community to claim 'association'. It seems like a waste of energy when they could both unite against the common enemy (not the Judean People's Front).
I agree racism is an endemic issue that should be tackled. My (current) irritation is that GRT peoples are not being counted in those to be supported, because they have all the same issues, if not more, and are permanently rendered invisible.
(This is something I've been passionate about since the early 1990s, when I started working with traveller families and became aware of the prejudice and discrimination meted out to them. I find it disappointing that the same things are having to be said thirty years later as things have not moved on.)
And as an addendum this is why BAME is the right phrase for the UK rather than POC because one of our most discriminated groups is not necessarily of colour. Using American sensibilities for the UK situation doesn't always work.
BAME - black and minority ethnic
POC - people of colour
Curiosity Killed, you're citing to me statistics which I completely agree with and also missing my point.
If the police unquestioningly take you for a cis het white respectable British bloke (whatever the truth) - you're getting a very different experience to that of those from any group, including your own, who don't have access to being read that way. You may be infuriated and hurt, deeply so, by the racist things you hear, but you're still in practice getting treated very differently which as we sadly know can make all too great a difference.
The problem is that there is information out there to suggest that the police do identify and target GRT people*. I find it interesting, for example, that the legal team that supported the family of Anthony Grainger includes:
one of the leading experts in representing Gypsies, Travellers and Roma source
Grainger is a fairly common traveller name, and as an aside the police misconduct case is still rumbling on as this omnishambles.
Bill or William Smith is a common Gypsy name and strangely enough his family was represented by the same chambers above. One of the documents I've read on the GRT community bemoans the lack of available legal support.
(That's just going from the Wikipedia list of deaths and names of people who died at the hands of the police where I recognise fairly unequivocal GRT surnames. If I can find 2 likely GRT names within the 10 names of white people out of the 25 killed at police hands in the last decade, that suggests a higher than 0.1% of the population attrition rate. That 15/25, 60%, killed are also BAME is also damning.)
In the US at a traffic stop, the first thing a cop usually does is get your license and car registration, so they know your name almost right off. Do they do that in the UK? Would they then be able to recognize some folks as travellers from their names?
In the UK, the police have ANPR (automatic number plate recognition). They know who the registered keeper of the car is, whether it has insurance, whether it has an MOT, whether it has been reported stolen or used to commit a crime, and potentially if the keeper is wanted for questioning or has previous convictions - before the police ever get out of their car.
The problem with the argument that GRT people can pass as white is that it strongly suggests that those who are targeted are not trying hard enough to keep themselves safe by hiding their origins. What with the recorded learning needs and homelessness issues for the GRT communities colour me unconvinced by that argument, particularly as I can visualise both having that conversation with some of the youngsters I've worked with and the resultant failure of comprehension.
I also can't see what makes GRT alongside black and brown people subject to the death penalty for offences that otherwise would leave white people alive.
(I didn't go looking through all of that list of police fatalities for travellers, just the two I recognised as typical GRT surnames, but the stories I did find when checking for colour of skin suggested that many of the other white people awarded the death penalty had mental health problems.)
To me it looks more like a civil war between two people who are both passionate for justice for communities they associate with,
Close, but not quite.
Nothing, in the interactions between he and I, indicates passion. Not that he is required to illustrate, but every indication I've got from him is a white man in a white world with the lack of understanding of identity that comes with that.
And the power of whiteness is my main point in that. So it is rather funny that white people spin that point into anti-GRT* instead of dealing with whiteness and identity.
And as an addendum this is why BAME is the right phrase for the UK rather than POC because one of our most discriminated groups is not necessarily of colour. Using American sensibilities for the UK situation doesn't always work.
BAME - black and minority ethnic
POC - people of colour
BAME=Black,Asian and Minority Ethnic The reason I don't like it is that it lumps all the other categories together as if they matter less than black or Asian.
POC doesn't do that, but it does ignore white minorities, so it misses the mark as well.
on an aesthetic note; BAME mirrors it origin as a soulless bureaucratic designation, where POC feels more poetic.
lilbuddha is not being yelled at for being racist, but for asserting that her gate keeping,
Yeah, that is kinda bullshit. Only white people think identity is something one can choose. White is a blank slate to which things are added, brown and black begin with a host of assumptions and prejudice. White GRT ar born into a world of the same, yes, but it is not their whiteness that brings attracts the assumptions.
None of this diminishes what GRT go through. Whilst quantifying suffering is fraught, IMO there are some ways the prejudice GRT face can be worse. If someone puts up a sign saying No Black people, they will likely face legal action. If they put up a no traveller sign, they will often be supported by the local authorities. BUt none of this, or your statistics has ONE. GODDAMN. THING. to do with what I have been arguing with EM about.
information and world view is the one and only correct one.
Obsiouly I think My POV is the correct one or I would not be arguing it. Same can be said for you.
But if you are going to attack my view, for fuck's sake get it right.
And as an addendum this is why BAME is the right phrase for the UK rather than POC because one of our most discriminated groups is not necessarily of colour. Using American sensibilities for the UK situation doesn't always work.
BAME - black and minority ethnic
POC - people of colour
BAME=Black,Asian and Minority Ethnic The reason I don't like it is that it lumps all the other categories together as if they matter less than black or Asian.
POC doesn't do that, but it does ignore white minorities, so it misses the mark as well.
on an aesthetic note; BAME mirrors it origin as a soulless bureaucratic designation, where POC feels more poetic.
BAME with Asian separated out is relatively recent. The confusion may be that the previous term was BME for Black and Minority Ethnic, which again largely displaced the older idea of "politically black".
I'm certainly not 'yelling racist'. I think lilbuddha continues to be very rude towards EM. It seems to me that EM may be finding things tricky here at present, so maybe we could be kind.
I'm not trying to be rude to EM. I'm trying to have a conversion about how white privilege works and he doesn't seem to get it. And there was no indication that he was having any struggles until well after this began.
Whilst its open season on others - ethnicity and ethnic identity.
Because ethnicity comes with negative treatment from the default white society. Putting it on like a frock or a hat is offensive to those of us who cannot don and doff it at will.
You, asher, are a white man living as a white man with white parents and grandparents.* You find out that you have a Black great, great grandmother. Are you now Black? Can you reasonably identify as Black? Can you know what a Black person, especially in Britain goes through?
Is it not an insult to call yourself Black?
BAME with Asian separated out is relatively recent. The confusion may be that the previous term was BME for Black and Minority Ethnic, which again largely displaced the older idea of "politically black".
Just read an article by Zamila Bunglawala, Deputy Head of Unit & Deputy Director Policy and Strategy, Race Disparity Unit, Cabinet Office who prefers ethnic minorities. It lack poetry, but it does include everyone without raising any group to prominence.
BAME=Black,Asian and Minority Ethnic The reason I don't like it is that it lumps all the other categories together as if they matter less than black or Asian.
POC doesn't do that, but it does ignore white minorities, so it misses the mark as well.
on an aesthetic note; BAME mirrors it origin as a soulless bureaucratic designation, where POC feels more poetic.
"People of color" is a useful catch-all for talking about non-white people in the US, but it has its limitations. Some Black people have pointed out that people sometimes mis-use the term, saying "POC" when talking about something specific to Black people. Some folks have turned to using "BIPOC" - Black, indigenous, and people of color - in order to put at the forefront the two groups who have suffered the most harm from white supremacy in the US.
I think that the same thinking as specifying Black and Asian in the UK-centric BAME term: they are the main minority groups here. (although one or two places are now minority white.)
Brown people. That's what my relatives mostly call themselves. When they aren't feeling the need to call themselves "nigga" to make "white" people uncomfortable.
It and the UK terminology don't encompass indigenous people who are also brownish in skin colours.
If an identity is stigmatised, whatever term you use eventually becomes a slur, and then you choose another term and so on until you are able to address the existence of the stigma. Even the n-word was originally just a colour descriptor.
(FWIW I had understood BAME to stand for for Black And Minority Ethnic.)
If an identity is stigmatised, whatever term you use eventually becomes a slur, and then you choose another term and so on until you are able to address the existence of the stigma.
AKA the euphemism treadmill.
When I was little we lived in Texas for a few years in the mid 60s, and I learned the phrase "colored people" at school and said it at home. My mother got a very strange look on her face and quietly said, "We say 'black people.'" Then we moved back to California and I learned "African-American" at some point, and later the hyphen went away.
Now we seem to be moving back to "black," except it's "Black." I queried my boss about that for the church newsletter a couple of weeks ago - which were we going to use? She asked what was standard, and I said, "Newspapers use 'black,' activists use 'Black,'" and she said to do what activists do. Then this past Tuesday the Los Angeles Times switched to capitalizing the B. As much as the euphemism treadmill is a real thing, terminology does matter.
Yes, it does, but it I do understand that people can lose track of which terms are getting tainted. My view on that is, once is a mistake, twice a coincidence and three times is trying to make a dodgy point.
The problem with the argument that GRT people can pass as white is that it strongly suggests that those who are targeted are not trying hard enough to keep themselves safe by hiding their origins.
The problem with your argument, including your responses to Louise, is that you continually think that any statement about GRT people must be equally applicable to all GRT people. As if they all look alike. Which is kind of ironic...
An argument that some GRT people can pass as white is not an argument that all GRT people can pass as white. It's an argument that some GRT people can pass as white because of how they look, and thus are less likely to experience discrimination than GRT people who don't look the same and cannot pass as white.
Talking as if this is making implications about effort is just weird. People have different skin tones. That's got absolutely nothing to do with effort, it's just a fact of the genetic shuffle.
Not all black people are the same shade of 'black' either (noting that 'black' and 'white' are both actually pretty inaccurate descriptors of people's actual skin colour).
This shouldn't be rocket science. Yet you keep talking as if it's an all or nothing proposition, that every GRT person has the exact same physical appearance.
I'm not trying to be rude to EM. I'm trying to have a conversion about how white privilege works and he doesn't seem to get it. And there was no indication that he was having any struggles until well after this began.
Coming back to this, and assuming that what is meant is a conversation not an attempt at conversion, and not as a defence of Exclamation Mark but an explanation what it was like growing up in rural Britain in the late 60s and 70s for me, and the 90s for my daughter. I suspect Exclamation Mark remembers earlier.
We moved around when I was a child, as did my daughter, so I have experience of different places. Across rural Northamptonshire and Dorset over three decades there were no ethnic minorities other than travellers to pick on. They just didn't exist. So guess who got bullied and marginalised? The kids from the caravan site or the settled travellers. They were the ethnic minority, the kids with no privilege¹.
When I worked in Somerset, on the Somerset/Dorset borders, the ethnic minority training funded by the EU (GEST* funding for those who remember it), was to learn about working with travellers because Somerset identified GRT as their biggest minority. That's how I attended that training.
If you're attuned to only white faces, the subtle differences in skin tone, hair type, facial features, dialects, accents and names make different groups easier to identify and target. Particularly in rural locations with smaller populations and far more awareness of everyone in the area. It makes it far harder, to quote Louise, for
the police [to] unquestioningly take you for a cis het white respectable British bloke (whatever the truth)
I've partly come back to this as I'm still chewing over the "coincidence" that the two cases I looked at, one in Greater Manchester and the other in Kent were represented by the same barristers' chambers based in London, the one that specialises in GRT cases. There are more than enough law chambers in Manchester and serving the north of England for local representation, usually.
* Grants for Education Support and Training
¹ When my daughter was at primary school in Dorset the son of the Chinese takeaway owners was already at secondary school, in Sunderland, she and the Chinese lad were picked on continuously by the school secretary as the only ethnic minority kids.
I've partly come back to this as I'm still chewing over the "coincidence" that the two cases I looked at, one in Greater Manchester and the other in Kent were represented by the same barristers' chambers based in London, the one that specialises in GRT cases. There are more than enough law chambers in Manchester and serving the north of England for local representation, usually.
Probably a tangent, but how many GRT cases would there be a year and what do they involve?
It's not recorded, the courts and police were noted to be failing in this regard under the latest, 2019, review.
I suspect there are ways to start searching to find the cases this chamber is involved in, if you're a lawyer, but it's not an area I'm familiar with. GRT cases are not the only speciality of this chambers, so it wouldn't be straightforward.
An argument that some GRT people can pass as white is not an argument that all GRT people can pass as white. It's an argument that some GRT people can pass as white because of how they look, and thus are less likely to experience discrimination than GRT people who don't look the same and cannot pass as white.
This is true, but either way, any assertion as to whether @ExclamationMark would pass as white or GRT (or either in a specific situation) is going to be an extrapolation which, without evidence either way, we don't know.
Which is why @Curiosity killed is right to have pointed out that @lilbuddha made certain assumptions about @ExclamationMark which, given the subtleties of recognition that mean that police (or anyone) can and do recognise people as GRT, were not necessary valid.
An argument that some GRT people can pass as white is not an argument that all GRT people can pass as white. It's an argument that some GRT people can pass as white because of how they look, and thus are less likely to experience discrimination than GRT people who don't look the same and cannot pass as white.
This is true, but either way, any assertion as to whether @ExclamationMark would pass as white or GRT (or either in a specific situation) is going to be an extrapolation which, without evidence either way, we don't know.
Actually, we do. The man's own words. He said he is perceived is as white.
The exchange above makes me wonder what would happen if we simply stopped using all these terms and stopped identifying one another by all these so-called "racial" or "ethnic" or "cultural" or "tribal" or "national origin" etc. labels.
I understand the use of such markers on a personal level. As I tell the "story" of "me/my family" to anyone interested (extremely small audience, I fear), the fact that one branch of my family has been in New England since 1627, participated in assorted historical events, etc., may be mildly interesting, but has zero practical or social significance (unless I want to sign up with the DAR, which I definitely do not).
Wouldn't it make ALL our lives simpler, to say nothing of possible less contentious, if we kept all these differences out of our civic lives?
@orfeo - I don't say all GRT people have the same faces, but I will reiterate my cross-posted response:
If you're attuned to only white faces, the subtle differences in skin tone, hair type, facial features, dialects, accents and names make different groups easier to identify and target.
I'll also point out that as a child, how much othering you receive is likely to be linked to how other your parents are perceived, whatever your own appearance.
I've just wandered down a tangentially linked rabbit hole, the Roma and Sinta victims of the Holocaust, and several of faces leapt out of the pages echoing the faces of those I worked with in the past and knew to be from traveller families, the shades of skin varying across a spectrum. I started by wondering if there were Roma and Sinta in the Warsaw Ghetto, to find that, yes, one of the groups that were rounded up to be incarcerated in the Ghetto were the Polish Roma and Sinta.
The exchange above makes me wonder what would happen if we simply stopped using all these terms and stopped identifying one another by all these so-called "racial" or "ethnic" or "cultural" or "tribal" or "national origin" etc. labels.
I understand the use of such markers on a personal level. As I tell the "story" of "me/my family" to anyone interested (extremely small audience, I fear), the fact that one branch of my family has been in New England since 1627, participated in assorted historical events, etc., may be mildly interesting, but has zero practical or social significance (unless I want to sign up with the DAR, which I definitely do not).
Wouldn't it make ALL our lives simpler, to say nothing of possible less contentious, if we kept all these differences out of our civic lives?
Until you wave a magic wand and make the unconscious prejudice vanish we have to be consciously aware of it in order to keep it in check.
The exchange above makes me wonder what would happen if we simply stopped using all these terms and stopped identifying one another by all these so-called "racial" or "ethnic" or "cultural" or "tribal" or "national origin" etc. labels.
If we stopped today, we are still left with the disadvantaged people being disadvantaged. The people formally called travellers would still be poor and poor makes life infinitely more difficult. Black people would still be poor, etc. And I'm not giving up my cultural heritage. Humans will define each other, it is built into our brains, we cannot stop that. But what we can do is change the values we put onto those definitions.
In England, many of the traveller support groups have traveller in their names unless they are aimed at only one group. Many of the articles and research I found has come from the Traveller Movement which aims to:
Promoting the inclusion of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers through community engagement, advocating their human rights and leading on powerful research to shape policy.
The much loved support worker/local authority liaison officer working with the family I supported until a couple of years ago, was called the traveller liaison officer.
@orfeo - I don't say all GRT people have the same faces, but I will reiterate my cross-posted response:
If you're attuned to only white faces, the subtle differences in skin tone, hair type, facial features, dialects, accents and names make different groups easier to identify and target.
I'll also point out that as a child, how much othering you receive is likely to be linked to how other your parents are perceived, whatever your own appearance.
I've just wandered down a tangentially linked rabbit hole, the Roma and Sinta victims of the Holocaust, and several of faces leapt out of the pages echoing the faces of those I worked with in the past and knew to be from traveller families, the shades of skin varying across a spectrum. I started by wondering if there were Roma and Sinta in the Warsaw Ghetto, to find that, yes, one of the groups that were rounded up to be incarcerated in the Ghetto were the Polish Roma and Sinta.
You're still thoroughly missing the point. As I was merely trying to pick up the baton and explain the same thing that someone else was already trying to explain to you, and I've had a really shitty night as it is, I'm not going to bother pursuing you through the wood any further. There are far too many trees and it's clear you are quite incapable of shifting your frame of reference to stop looking at them.
I'm not trying to be rude to EM. I'm trying to have a conversion about how white privilege works and he doesn't seem to get it. And there was no indication that he was having any struggles until well after this began.
Coming back to this, and assuming that what is meant is a conversation not an attempt at conversion, and not as a defence of Exclamation Mark but an explanation what it was like growing up in rural Britain in the late 60s and 70s for me, and the 90s for my daughter. I suspect Exclamation Mark remembers earlier.
We moved around when I was a child, as did my daughter, so I have experience of different places. Across rural Northamptonshire and Dorset over three decades there were no ethnic minorities other than travellers to pick on. They just didn't exist. So guess who got bullied and marginalised? The kids from the caravan site or the settled travellers. They were the ethnic minority, the kids with no privilege¹.
Children are dicks. The biggest shit among them will find someone to pick on and the other little bastards, happy that it isn't them, will join in. If there is no distinct group, it'll be age, hair colour or who has the most baby teeth.
If you're attuned to only white faces, the subtle differences in skin tone, hair type, facial features, dialects, accents and names make different groups easier to identify and target. Particularly in rural locations with smaller populations and far more awareness of everyone in the area. It makes it far harder, to quote Louise, for
the police [to] unquestioningly take you for a cis het white respectable British bloke (whatever the truth)
I have to question this. This man, musician Louis Prima, was barred from some clubs because they though be might be black. This man, actor Espera Oscar de Corti (AKA Iron Eyes Cody), was accepted as Indian by white America.
In neither case did the subtle cues clue other white people in.
People see what they want/expect/fear to see. It can be as fine or gross as the expectation.
The GRT community experience prejudice and it is bad. Literally no one here is denying this.
What I am saying is this has nothing to do with EM, who has said white people perceive him as white, even a cop who had prejudice against Roma.
If he feels the discrimination because of his family's experiences, he hasn't said it.
These two girls are twins. The white one will have an easier life than the black one. That is what I am talking about. Pretty damn simple.
BTW by your reckoning, I should have bi-racial radar, and I would never have had a clue that the ginger one had any black in her.
Barnabas62Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host, Epiphanies Host
The world is not changing quickly enough for me but I think the Aylmer twins will both do OK. In an interview, Lucy, the pale one with red hair, said she was not accepted as Maria's sister but schoolmates thought she must be adopted. They nicknamed her 'ghost'! Certainly Maria looks very like her mum!
I wish them both well. From the interview they were both delightful and seemed to have taken their differences in their stride.
BAME with Asian separated out is relatively recent. The confusion may be that the previous term was BME for Black and Minority Ethnic, which again largely displaced the older idea of "politically black".
This thread is the first time I gathered that the 'A' was supposed to be Asian rather than 'and', spelled out so that you could pronounce it with one syllable.
It and the UK terminology don't encompass indigenous people who are also brownish in skin colours.
The UK doesn't have indigenous people. Neolithic Britons were basically completely replaced by the Beaker people. Their culture, in turn, has been replaced by successive waves of invaders, although modern Brits probably have significant genetic inheritance from the Beaker people.
But I wonder why you say the UK term "BAME" wouldn't encompass indigenous people in Canada - surely they would qualify as "minority ethnic"?
I don't know Exclamation Mark, but many of the things he says ring true about settled traveller families I've worked with
and
Just like with Exclamation Mark - you're asserting that he cannot possibly have any Roma or traveller heritage, with, I suspect, precisely zero experience of settled Roma or travellers in the UK. here
Coming back to this, and assuming that what is meant is a conversation not an attempt at conversion, and not as a defence of Exclamation Mark but an explanation what it was like growing up in rural Britain in the late 60s and 70s for me, and the 90s for my daughter. I suspect Exclamation Mark remembers earlier.
and @lilbuddha I've come across that red hair with fair freckled skin combination in the Afro-Caribbean community before - for example, this guy. One of the mixed race, obviously Caribbean heritage kids I worked with had a blue-eyed, fair-haired grandmother and mother, but the rest of his family had all shades of skin, hair and eyes. His father and grandfather were very much black Caribbean.
If he feels the discrimination because of his family's experiences, he hasn't said it.
Yes. You ASSUMED it. And then proceeded to jump all over him/her, in your role as gatekeeper and educator of the masses.
Some humility and caution before proceeding would come in handy.
Your logic is as solid as your coding. I didn't assume, I asked him questions regarding how he was perceived and he responded as being perceived as white. Although he has no obligation to, he has had plenty of opportunity to clarify his familial experience. Which he has not done. If anyone is assuming it is you and CK. I've assumed nothing. I've said his apparent understanding of identity does not indicate any direct experience of ethnic prejudice. Which is an observation, not an assumption.
Which, if you actually read what I've written, you'd understand.
There is a real discussion about identity here, but y'all would rather jump my arse than deal with that.
Regarding gate-keeping. Such a fucking poorly used term.
As I've mentioned, I've a little, remote, East Asian ancestry from a sailor ancestor travelling the western pacific waaaaaay back in the day. It isn't gate-keeping to say it would be completely ridiculous to call myself Asian. It would be even more ridiculous for a white European to identify as black, simply because everyone has African ancestry at some point in prehistory.
Ancestry ≠ identity is not gate-keeping, it is fucking common sense.
To say a white person raised in the dominant white culture doesn't have an ethnic experience simply because they have ethnic ancestry is not gate-keeping, it is an acknowledgement of how culture works.
Comments
You're forgetting Telford and Russ.
and from this Parliamentary Publication Tackling inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities from 2019:
The 2011 census was the first to collect information about the GRT community, and it was recommended a tick box be included in the 2021 census
We just do not know how likely it is for GRT community members to die at police hands because that information has not been collected.
lilbuddha is not being yelled at for being racist, but for asserting that her gate keeping, information and world view is the one and only correct one.
¹ Yes, I was sad enough to check the list and find the reports of the time to work out who of that list was white. answer: Sean Fitzgerald, Richard Cottier, Spencer Ashworth, Lewis Skelton, Josh Pitt, William Smith, James Wilson, Richard Davies and James Fox;
² Parliamentary briefing entitled Discrimination facing Gypsies Roma and Travellers in the UK today
I am puzzled that there seems to be some aspects of identity that are beyond query and question - gender and sexuality. Whilst its open season on others - ethnicity and ethnic identity.
Asher
(There are no stats kept by the home office of GRT levels in prison, but the Guardian reports that 5% of the prison population are GRT with a census data shows that 0.1% of the UK population are GRT.
The Traveller Times reports that local authorities have a 'hidden' policy of building traveller sites next to refuse tips and sewage treatment works. I can think of 2 locations in the East of England where traveller sites are wedged between the two.)
According to the information I've seen, since 2011. I know I monitored the traveller kids I worked with in an alternative education setting since 2013 and it was coded into the systems. It was something we monitored closely, as this setting worked with a significant proportion of travellers, far more than 0.1% of our student base, more like 5%. But the kids I worked with in mainstream in the early 2000s weren't coded for traveller status, and some at least were GRT*.
However, the police and court system have not been using those codes according to the recent, 2019, parliamentary publications considering GRT discrimination.
* I dealt with one at least of our kids having a rough time for being a traveller, taking a lot of abuse for it - I suspect with hindsight, they were also dealing with being burnt out of a previous van. I was aware of at least one other, but as part of the special needs administration I wasn't monitoring traveller learning, lots of other needs, but not travellers. That school is in a town with a traveller camp on the hidden in behind the edges of the town.
(This is something I've been passionate about since the early 1990s, when I started working with traveller families and became aware of the prejudice and discrimination meted out to them. I find it disappointing that the same things are having to be said thirty years later as things have not moved on.)
BAME - black and minority ethnic
POC - people of colour
If the police unquestioningly take you for a cis het white respectable British bloke (whatever the truth) - you're getting a very different experience to that of those from any group, including your own, who don't have access to being read that way. You may be infuriated and hurt, deeply so, by the racist things you hear, but you're still in practice getting treated very differently which as we sadly know can make all too great a difference.
Grainger is a fairly common traveller name, and as an aside the police misconduct case is still rumbling on as this omnishambles.
Bill or William Smith is a common Gypsy name and strangely enough his family was represented by the same chambers above. One of the documents I've read on the GRT community bemoans the lack of available legal support.
(That's just going from the Wikipedia list of deaths and names of people who died at the hands of the police where I recognise fairly unequivocal GRT surnames. If I can find 2 likely GRT names within the 10 names of white people out of the 25 killed at police hands in the last decade, that suggests a higher than 0.1% of the population attrition rate. That 15/25, 60%, killed are also BAME is also damning.)
* There are recent cases of IOPC judgements for GRT people - eg Operation Willow (pdf link), the Gross misconduct hearing of Kent gypsy liaison team members
Potentially yes, is the answer.
I also can't see what makes GRT alongside black and brown people subject to the death penalty for offences that otherwise would leave white people alive.
(I didn't go looking through all of that list of police fatalities for travellers, just the two I recognised as typical GRT surnames, but the stories I did find when checking for colour of skin suggested that many of the other white people awarded the death penalty had mental health problems.)
Nothing, in the interactions between he and I, indicates passion. Not that he is required to illustrate, but every indication I've got from him is a white man in a white world with the lack of understanding of identity that comes with that.
And the power of whiteness is my main point in that. So it is rather funny that white people spin that point into anti-GRT* instead of dealing with whiteness and identity.
*Especially when they incorporated the G and T.
BAME=Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic The reason I don't like it is that it lumps all the other categories together as if they matter less than black or Asian.
POC doesn't do that, but it does ignore white minorities, so it misses the mark as well.
on an aesthetic note; BAME mirrors it origin as a soulless bureaucratic designation, where POC feels more poetic.
None of this diminishes what GRT go through. Whilst quantifying suffering is fraught, IMO there are some ways the prejudice GRT face can be worse. If someone puts up a sign saying No Black people, they will likely face legal action. If they put up a no traveller sign, they will often be supported by the local authorities. BUt none of this, or your statistics has ONE. GODDAMN. THING. to do with what I have been arguing with EM about.
Obsiouly I think My POV is the correct one or I would not be arguing it. Same can be said for you.
But if you are going to attack my view, for fuck's sake get it right.
BAME with Asian separated out is relatively recent. The confusion may be that the previous term was BME for Black and Minority Ethnic, which again largely displaced the older idea of "politically black".
You, asher, are a white man living as a white man with white parents and grandparents.* You find out that you have a Black great, great grandmother. Are you now Black? Can you reasonably identify as Black? Can you know what a Black person, especially in Britain goes through?
Is it not an insult to call yourself Black?
*An assumption, for sake of argument.
"People of color" is a useful catch-all for talking about non-white people in the US, but it has its limitations. Some Black people have pointed out that people sometimes mis-use the term, saying "POC" when talking about something specific to Black people. Some folks have turned to using "BIPOC" - Black, indigenous, and people of color - in order to put at the forefront the two groups who have suffered the most harm from white supremacy in the US.
It and the UK terminology don't encompass indigenous people who are also brownish in skin colours.
(FWIW I had understood BAME to stand for for Black And Minority Ethnic.)
AKA the euphemism treadmill.
When I was little we lived in Texas for a few years in the mid 60s, and I learned the phrase "colored people" at school and said it at home. My mother got a very strange look on her face and quietly said, "We say 'black people.'" Then we moved back to California and I learned "African-American" at some point, and later the hyphen went away.
Now we seem to be moving back to "black," except it's "Black." I queried my boss about that for the church newsletter a couple of weeks ago - which were we going to use? She asked what was standard, and I said, "Newspapers use 'black,' activists use 'Black,'" and she said to do what activists do. Then this past Tuesday the Los Angeles Times switched to capitalizing the B. As much as the euphemism treadmill is a real thing, terminology does matter.
The problem with your argument, including your responses to Louise, is that you continually think that any statement about GRT people must be equally applicable to all GRT people. As if they all look alike. Which is kind of ironic...
An argument that some GRT people can pass as white is not an argument that all GRT people can pass as white. It's an argument that some GRT people can pass as white because of how they look, and thus are less likely to experience discrimination than GRT people who don't look the same and cannot pass as white.
Talking as if this is making implications about effort is just weird. People have different skin tones. That's got absolutely nothing to do with effort, it's just a fact of the genetic shuffle.
Not all black people are the same shade of 'black' either (noting that 'black' and 'white' are both actually pretty inaccurate descriptors of people's actual skin colour).
This shouldn't be rocket science. Yet you keep talking as if it's an all or nothing proposition, that every GRT person has the exact same physical appearance.
Coming back to this, and assuming that what is meant is a conversation not an attempt at conversion, and not as a defence of Exclamation Mark but an explanation what it was like growing up in rural Britain in the late 60s and 70s for me, and the 90s for my daughter. I suspect Exclamation Mark remembers earlier.
We moved around when I was a child, as did my daughter, so I have experience of different places. Across rural Northamptonshire and Dorset over three decades there were no ethnic minorities other than travellers to pick on. They just didn't exist. So guess who got bullied and marginalised? The kids from the caravan site or the settled travellers. They were the ethnic minority, the kids with no privilege¹.
When I worked in Somerset, on the Somerset/Dorset borders, the ethnic minority training funded by the EU (GEST* funding for those who remember it), was to learn about working with travellers because Somerset identified GRT as their biggest minority. That's how I attended that training.
If you're attuned to only white faces, the subtle differences in skin tone, hair type, facial features, dialects, accents and names make different groups easier to identify and target. Particularly in rural locations with smaller populations and far more awareness of everyone in the area. It makes it far harder, to quote Louise, for
I've partly come back to this as I'm still chewing over the "coincidence" that the two cases I looked at, one in Greater Manchester and the other in Kent were represented by the same barristers' chambers based in London, the one that specialises in GRT cases. There are more than enough law chambers in Manchester and serving the north of England for local representation, usually.
* Grants for Education Support and Training
¹ When my daughter was at primary school in Dorset the son of the Chinese takeaway owners was already at secondary school, in Sunderland, she and the Chinese lad were picked on continuously by the school secretary as the only ethnic minority kids.
Probably a tangent, but how many GRT cases would there be a year and what do they involve?
I suspect there are ways to start searching to find the cases this chamber is involved in, if you're a lawyer, but it's not an area I'm familiar with. GRT cases are not the only speciality of this chambers, so it wouldn't be straightforward.
This is true, but either way, any assertion as to whether @ExclamationMark would pass as white or GRT (or either in a specific situation) is going to be an extrapolation which, without evidence either way, we don't know.
Which is why @Curiosity killed is right to have pointed out that @lilbuddha made certain assumptions about @ExclamationMark which, given the subtleties of recognition that mean that police (or anyone) can and do recognise people as GRT, were not necessary valid.
I understand the use of such markers on a personal level. As I tell the "story" of "me/my family" to anyone interested (extremely small audience, I fear), the fact that one branch of my family has been in New England since 1627, participated in assorted historical events, etc., may be mildly interesting, but has zero practical or social significance (unless I want to sign up with the DAR, which I definitely do not).
Wouldn't it make ALL our lives simpler, to say nothing of possible less contentious, if we kept all these differences out of our civic lives?
I'll also point out that as a child, how much othering you receive is likely to be linked to how other your parents are perceived, whatever your own appearance.
I've just wandered down a tangentially linked rabbit hole, the Roma and Sinta victims of the Holocaust, and several of faces leapt out of the pages echoing the faces of those I worked with in the past and knew to be from traveller families, the shades of skin varying across a spectrum. I started by wondering if there were Roma and Sinta in the Warsaw Ghetto, to find that, yes, one of the groups that were rounded up to be incarcerated in the Ghetto were the Polish Roma and Sinta.
Until you wave a magic wand and make the unconscious prejudice vanish we have to be consciously aware of it in order to keep it in check.
The much loved support worker/local authority liaison officer working with the family I supported until a couple of years ago, was called the traveller liaison officer.
You're still thoroughly missing the point. As I was merely trying to pick up the baton and explain the same thing that someone else was already trying to explain to you, and I've had a really shitty night as it is, I'm not going to bother pursuing you through the wood any further. There are far too many trees and it's clear you are quite incapable of shifting your frame of reference to stop looking at them.
I have to question this. This man, musician Louis Prima, was barred from some clubs because they though be might be black. This man, actor Espera Oscar de Corti (AKA Iron Eyes Cody), was accepted as Indian by white America.
In neither case did the subtle cues clue other white people in.
People see what they want/expect/fear to see. It can be as fine or gross as the expectation.
The GRT community experience prejudice and it is bad. Literally no one here is denying this.
What I am saying is this has nothing to do with EM, who has said white people perceive him as white, even a cop who had prejudice against Roma.
If he feels the discrimination because of his family's experiences, he hasn't said it.
These two girls are twins. The white one will have an easier life than the black one. That is what I am talking about. Pretty damn simple.
BTW by your reckoning, I should have bi-racial radar, and I would never have had a clue that the ginger one had any black in her.
I wish them both well. From the interview they were both delightful and seemed to have taken their differences in their stride.
This thread is the first time I gathered that the 'A' was supposed to be Asian rather than 'and', spelled out so that you could pronounce it with one syllable.
The UK doesn't have indigenous people. Neolithic Britons were basically completely replaced by the Beaker people. Their culture, in turn, has been replaced by successive waves of invaders, although modern Brits probably have significant genetic inheritance from the Beaker people.
But I wonder why you say the UK term "BAME" wouldn't encompass indigenous people in Canada - surely they would qualify as "minority ethnic"?
and this here:
and @lilbuddha I've come across that red hair with fair freckled skin combination in the Afro-Caribbean community before - for example, this guy. One of the mixed race, obviously Caribbean heritage kids I worked with had a blue-eyed, fair-haired grandmother and mother, but the rest of his family had all shades of skin, hair and eyes. His father and grandfather were very much black Caribbean.
Which, if you actually read what I've written, you'd understand.
There is a real discussion about identity here, but y'all would rather jump my arse than deal with that.
As I've mentioned, I've a little, remote, East Asian ancestry from a sailor ancestor travelling the western pacific waaaaaay back in the day. It isn't gate-keeping to say it would be completely ridiculous to call myself Asian. It would be even more ridiculous for a white European to identify as black, simply because everyone has African ancestry at some point in prehistory.
Ancestry ≠ identity is not gate-keeping, it is fucking common sense.
To say a white person raised in the dominant white culture doesn't have an ethnic experience simply because they have ethnic ancestry is not gate-keeping, it is an acknowledgement of how culture works.